ABOUT THIS EPISODE
The internet is arguing about a new claim: developers no longer write code, they manage agents. Does that mean we have all been promoted to management?
Robert and Matt start with the talk that set it off. At Rails World last week, DHH said he has retired from professional programming and now calls himself an “Energized Professional Maker.” We go through his main points. He says the old 10x-programmer debate is obsolete, because the gap between a weak programmer without agents and a strong one with them is closer to 100x to 1,000x. In about 20 months he produced roughly half as much code as in the previous 21 years. 37signals is moving Hey from a web app to a Rust backend service, written without reading the code, with native apps on six platforms. And according to DHH, your app needs a CLI, not excuses. We also cover his recent work on Omarchy and compare all of this with Gallup polling that shows optimism about AI is uneven around the world and lower in the West.
Is running agents like being a manager? We look at Denise Schannon’s take on that comparison and at a four-level model of agentic software development in the enterprise. Then we look at developers taking the opposite path, such as the proposed no-AI policy from some GNOME developers. Rob explains why some developers want AI out of their work and what that could mean for them.
We finish with DHH’s claim that slop is “an executable idea” and return to the question from our previous episode: where do development and engineering fit now?
Links- DHH’s talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXY
- Gallup, global optimism about AI: https://news.gallup.com/poll/714593/optimism-globally-widespread-despite-uneven.aspx
- Denise Schannon on managing agents: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7508548991379484672/
- Four levels of agentic software development: https://kasparvongruenberg.substack.com/p/four-levels-of-agentic-software-development
- The GNOME LLM policy proposal: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2026/09/23/the-gnome-llm-policy-that-i-want/
- DHH on slop: https://x.com/dhh/status/2103454839086706746
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuKX0EnULr8
